Articles with python

Some time ago, I was given the opportunity to take a free course in Python. I was like “Sure why not? And it’s free? Woot!” (I don’t actually say “woot” but it seems like the kind of thing people say, right?)

The course is a beginner module meant for technical people (but not full-on coders). I was the only professional programmer in the class. I didn’t care, I don’t know Python. So 2 points of interest…

White space is critical

The programming languages I know consider white space as something to make the code easier to read for the human. Python elevates that to a whole new level.

I’m not even talking about the debate about whether a tab or 4 spaces is better for indentation. Python will punish you if you used 4 spaces for indentation here and then use 3 spaces for indentation there. This is especially terrible if you use an editor where a tab looks like 4 spaces so it looks like the indentation is fine but it’s not.

Parameter values are by default passed by reference

This one took a bit of getting used to. I’m used to passing values to functions and knowing that those values (or classes or structs) will never be tampered with unless I say so. For example, with the “ref” keyword in C#: